Motorola Drops Google for Baidu in China

A preemptive strike by Motorola has started to give food for thought to other OEMs about the Google’s exit threat to China. Motorola has announced it alliance with Baidu, China’s biggest search engine to be the default search engine in all its handsets in China. This gives a clear indication that Motorola is letting itself go of the Google’s partnership on making Google the default search engine on its latest Android based phones. It also makes other wonder whether Google’s threat was actually the right move to pull off.

It will be like domino effect where Motorola has taken the first step and we will see others follow suit.

Motorola has also announced setting up Andoid stores in China, which will offer Android based applications to the customers and other OEM running Android on their phones will be able to create partnership with Motorola to utilize its resources for their own customer base. Motorola saw a continued decline in China where its market share has declined from 20% to 2% in the last few years.

With new Droid, and upcoming Android based phones, Motorola is expecting a rapid growth of market share in China and this latest alliance might just prove to be the right step for Motorola’s recovery in China’s handset market.

Talking to the press Christy Wyatt, Motorola’s vice president for software and services, said that the company wanted to give consumers choices for search and had been working on providing alternatives for some time.

“In some cases we have either operator customers or individual consumers who are more comfortable with something different. In the case of Baidu its obviously a brand that’s very well known in China,” Wyatt said.